Rising Impact, the review of the anime on Netflix

Superhuman talent, perseverance, spectacular exaggerations and increasingly difficult challenges: these are some of the elements that have made sports genre anime and manga, the so-called spokonparticularly loved and famous among enthusiasts, and beyond.
Depending on the generation of your interlocutor, it is impossible that they have never heard of Giants starOf Mimi Hayuwara (or her “cousin” Mila), by Captain Tsubasa (or Holly Hatton…) or, more recently, Hinata Shoyo’s Haikyu! and Yoichi Isagi’s BlueLock.
But excite the spectators with sports that are already normally frenetic and exciting it’s easy: try doing it with golf!
And, of course, just ask…

The Knights of Golf

We are in Japan (of course…).
During a holiday in the mountains Kiria Noshino, a professional golf player comes across a child of foreign origin by chance, Gawain Nanaumi, who demonstrates strong physical skills. Life in the mountains has in fact worked miracles on the boy’s seemingly tender and slender body. Furthermore, Gawain, along with his friends, has a real passion for finding ways to throw a ball as far as possible: he is convinced that the answer is baseball, but when Kiria shows him that he is capable of throw the golf ball hundreds of meters away thanks to the driver, the club used by golfers to start their journey, Gawain is struck and discovers his true vocation. Impressed by the little one’s skills, Kiria promises to make him a professional player.

After wistfully saying goodbye to his grandfather, his only family member, Gawain then moves to the city to live with Kiria. From now on begins his golf careerin a crescendo of new friendships and increasingly demanding challenges to overcome one’s limits and defects.
Gawain then meets the charming rising star of youth golf, Lancelot Norman, who will become his rival. As much as Gawain is skilled at long shots, Lancelot is a real ace when it comes to holing the ball when it is on the green, the area closest to the target.

During a challenge with Lancelot, Gawain is noticed by Merlin Albright, headmaster of the Japanese headquarters of the prestigious Camelot Academya school that trains young people from England, the United States and Japan not only academically, but above all as professional golf players.
Entering the Camelot Academy is just a new step for Gawain, who is preparing to face the difficult challenge of the Camelot Cup, the competition between the three academy locations from which only the best will emerge victorious.

Even golf can be spectacular (?)

Rising Impact is based on a manga by Nakaba Suzukipublished in Japan by Shueisha and still unpublished in Italy.
The stylistic features of the spokon genre are more or less all there: the extraordinary talent of the protagonist, endowed with the unique ability to “see” the perfect point of impact between bat and ball, his unshakable determination to improve and win every challenge, even those against himself, the large cast of supporting characters who move from rivalry to friendship with the protagonist.

There is no shortage of exaggerations either which have made the genre so compelling, often to the detriment of realism in dealing with events on the course: in this case they range from the extraordinary skills of young players to a rather picturesque vision of golf. In addition to Gawain being capable of hitting the ball with superhuman strength and precision, there are people who apply the principles of kung-fu to golfothers who see the trajectories of the shots in the form of snakes of shadow or roads of light, and so on.
Furthermore, the competition courses seem to have been designed with a video game editor, with plenty of pitfalls, roller coaster-like differences in height, unlikely shapes (there is a hole designed in the shape of a wardrobe hanger…) and so on and so forth , the more you put.
In short: if you are looking for a series that brings concentration and the relaxed, pleasant upper-class attitude of
this sport, you have the wrong title.

Golf is a matter of technique (and funny faces)

As for the actual implementation, we must underline that Gawain’s characterization is quite annoyingonly partly justified by his young age, and that in any case golf is, clearly, only the pretext to tell a story already seen in countless other titles.
However, Rising Impact is still a decent product, with a good technical achievement by studio Lay-Duce (former members of the more famous Studio Bones) and the confident direction of Hitoshi Nanba, already at the helm of the excellent anime transposition of Golden Kamui.
The character design follows that of the manga, with Stereotypical but well-defined charactersand alternates (in truth, in a not very fluid way) more serious moments with more blatantly comic scenes, with the usual “funny faces” of the protagonists or their super-deformed versions.

The story continues on fairly predictable tracksfocusing on Gawain’s growth and the difficulty of reconciling his desire to “hit the ball as hard as possible” with the sport’s need to approach the holes with different strategies and techniques.
However, this first season ends, as they say, on a high note, with the promise of a clash at the top in the next, and already announced season.
Unfortunately, the Italian dubbing is missing, and there is – which is quite rare in the anime scene – only an ending song, and no opening.